The Runaway Wife (4 page)

“Clio asked us to check out a few caves in the region,” said Ambrose, “but I agree—not only is this rocky plateau formidable, but it's also too open for someone in hiding, especially with a helicopter searching overhead.”

Jumping from one surface to the other, to the other, to the other, head bent, Jim thought of his first day of work, a week from Monday at Wolfe, Taylor. The work space they had shown him was, appropriately, labeled the “inner
sanctum.” His desk was one among thirty, not unlike his mattress in the sleeping room at the Cabane. The firm occupied the fourth floor of 535 Madison Avenue on Fifty-Fourth Street, where, unfortunately, the endless corridor of buildings along the avenue blocked most of the natural light. Even the coveted corner offices were dark.

Ambrose stopped. “I can't see the next marker.”

Swiftly moving clouds, like marching troops, had invaded the morning's blue sky. Jim pulled his water bottle from his knapsack, drank, and scanned the boneyard horizon.

“Break to get our bearings,” he said.

“Agreed, pathfinder,” said Ambrose.

They found a flat, smooth ledge and removed their knapsacks, drank water, and snacked on Swiss sausage and cheese from the Acolas lunch bags.

“If this mountain were a man,” said Ambrose, tapping the rock with his trekking pole, “then this surely would be his ribcage. The markers are placed relatively closely, so I'm confused that we can't see the next one. Have I taken us off the path? You remember, Jim, I have to leave tomorrow morning. I have to sell the Bronzino that will send Zoë and Thierry to school next year.”

“See that cave over there?” Jim pointed. “I don't think I would have seen it if we hadn't stopped. Let's check it out. Who knows, we might come across the female hermit whom the sisters mentioned last night.

“What would she eat up here?”

“What would she
do
up here?”

“That we shall discover if we meet her or madame.”

Ambrose adjusted his pack and unzipped his jacket. “Thalia told me something about her mother's childhood that I'm still digesting.”

Jim tapped his walking pole on the lapiaz.

“Where was I when you were having
this
tete-a-tete?”

“We were in the buffet line. Apparently, when Calliope was a young girl she was driving with her parents and her brother from Paris to their home in the Loire Valley, with the parents' best friends, a husband and wife, driving behind them. When they stopped to get gas, Calliope's mother suggested that she switch seats with her friend in the other car. Her friend took Calliope's mother's place next to Calliope's father. After driving a ways, the father realized that the car with his wife and his friend was no longer behind them. He pulled over and waited. Of course, there were no cell phones back then. They retraced the road, suspecting a flat tire or dead car battery. Finally they went on toward the chateau, thinking that Calliope's mother, who knew the area well, had found a faster route.”

“Ambrose the confessor. People tell you everything.”

“Calliope's mother and the monsieur never showed up—not that night, not the following day, not the following week, not the following month. It wasn't until months,
months
, later, after an insane amount of alarm, panic, and searching, that Calliope's mother called to announce that she and her best friend's husband were madly in love and had driven off the map.”

“Ouch. That must have been brutal on the children.”

“Not to mention the husband.”

“Calliope, abandoned by her mother. The apple doesn't—”

“Clio told me that her mother said it would have been better for them all if the couple had been in a car accident.”

“Harsh. Did they divorce?”

“Calliope's mother eventually returned to her husband, but only after her lover had died.”

“Do you think there's a lover in
this
story?”

“The daughters would have told us, wouldn't they? Oh, voilà, thank God, I see it, I see it, there it is!” Ambrose stood and pointed to the sliver of red stick on the ridge above them. “Great idea of yours, my pathfinder friend, to stop and rest. I think the only way we could have seen it is from this vantage point.” He rose. “Let's check out that cave. Do you hear that groaning sound?”

A herd of steinbock, the antelope of the Alps—there must have been fifteen of them—stood less than thirty feet away on the ledge below them. The low-hanging mist from the clouds must have obscured them only minutes before. Now, in the full sunlight, Jim could make out the ribbed design on their horns that curved backward like Indian chiefs' feathered headdresses. The valley that Ambrose labeled the Iffigtal opened up far away and beneath them, in the form of shapely, rounded patches of green separated by glimmers of silver rivers.

Jim would have liked to stop and take a photograph, but
Ambrose was already far ahead of him, hopscotching right and left. Jim could tell that his friend was anxious about crossing the lapiaz before dark. After an hour, Ambrose stopped at the entrance of a cave, one of the thousand yawning mouths of the mountain.

“Hermitess!” Ambrose called.

Hermitess, tess, ess, ss, s, s
, the mountains mimicked. Jim switched on his flashlight, and the beam pierced the stale-smelling darkness of the cave. It was cold and pitch-black inside.

“No one home,” said Ambrose, returning to the light.

THE SUN WAS AT THEIR BACKS AS THEY RETURNED
to the white expanse of bonescape.

“The next marker!” Jim yelled ahead to Ambrose. “I've cracked the code.”

“While no one mentioned how dangerous it is to climb through this mind-numbing heap of sediment,” said Ambrose when Jim caught up to him, “one of the Italian hikers did tell me not to miss the mountain lake near the col. The lake is situated on one of the highest elevations in the Northern Hemisphere.”

“I would jump into it now,” said Jim, removing his Windbreaker and tying it around his waist.

“Listen,” said Ambrose.

Jim heard a pounding, a rushing of water, steady, but fluctuating in tone from one moment to the next. It was like
different sections of an orchestra playing simultaneously, a symphony of horns, clarinets, and trumpets accompanied by distant drumbeats. Had they climbed into the larynx of the mountain?

“Waterfalls,” said Ambrose. “We're at the Col d'Aiguille. See the peak sticking up horizontally, like a needle?”

Perspiring from the heat of the midday sun, the hikers crested the double-fanged ridge and stood back in amazement. In the vista ahead, the large, shimmering, glacial lake looked like a mirage. Eight, nine, ten, eleven waterfalls—Jim lost count—cascaded from the cliffs into the clear, azure-blue lake below. The sharp peak resembled the prow of a ship steaming toward them.

“Rainbows!” yelled Jim over the roar of the water.

Rainbows, hundreds of them, arched one after another across the falls.

“It looks as if you can walk over them to the other side of the lake,” said Ambrose, at Jim's side.

After hours of hiking over atonal mountainscape, the ribbons of colors refracting off the sparkling lake were almost blinding. A fringe of color also lined the lake's edge, the first sign of plant life Jim had seen in days. The patterns of wildflowers dotting the rock faces reminded Jim of a similar template of stars that had decorated the sky the night before. He felt in his pocket for the velvet ribbon.

At the lake's edge, they ate lunch on a large, flat rock. “It's hard to believe that
this
is on the other side of
that
,” said Ambrose, gesturing toward the lapiaz with his water canis
ter. “We're at a higher altitude than we were at the Cabane.”

“If I were Calliope, I'd pitch my tent here,” said Jim.

“There's no protection from the sun up here,” said Ambrose, looking around as he packed the remains of lunch. “I'm burning up as we speak.” He removed sunblock from his knapsack, slathered it on his face, and handed the tube to Jim.

The path diverged ahead of them, narrow lines curving around either side of the lake.

“Which way, pathfinder?” Ambrose asked.

“I don't see a marker, but the path to the right looks more trodden.” Jim pointed. “Tell me why we're the only hikers up here.”

Ambrose did not hear the question over the pounding of the falls. They hiked the eastern slope near the lake's edge for the next three hours, the rock face smoother and the path clear. Freed from the need to concentrate on each footstep, Jim's thoughts wandered. What a luxury it was to let his mind go, unleashed from the logistics of work and daily life. He and Sally had shared the opinion that reflection was an indulgence; people who spent too much time thinking about the past could only get stuck.

After a week of hiking, however, he'd changed his mind. Running away from thoughts or creating busyness so there was no time to reflect struck him now as an act of cowardice. Reflection could very well be the sunlight needed for a human's photosynthesis.

Jim had obviously missed a few red markers on the
landscape where Sally was concerned. Why hadn't he seen the breakup coming? When was the moment that she had changed her heart, her mind? Later, it came out that she'd told her parents a month before she'd let him know. A month! The wedding invitations had already been sent, but the reception room at the Plaza, the cake, the staff, the preparations had needed to be canceled ASAP, she'd said. She'd had to tell her parents immediately, but her fiancé? She could never find the right time to tell him.

“So you decided to tell me over the phone?” he'd asked her. He could feel fresh anger mounting as he remembered.

“I wouldn't have been able to handle it if I told you in person,” she'd said meekly.

She'd been pretending when they'd laid a picnic in Central Park only a few days earlier. He remembered her laughing, pouring him wine, acting like their future together was as clear as the water in the sailboat lake. He'd asked a few questions about the wedding preparations, but she'd said she didn't want to talk about it, that a groom shouldn't know the details. They had kissed, made love back in his apartment. And yet by that point she had already moved on to his replacement. How could such a small body carry such duplicity?

AFTER ANOTHER TWO HOURS, JIM PAUSED ON A DIRT
path at a small crescent of white beach lining another interconnecting lake, not far from the entrance to a cave. He
watched a furry hyrax disappear under a rock. Ambrose was far ahead.

“Ambrose!” Jim motioned for him to come back. “It'll be dark in a few hours and this looks like a good place to sleep.”

“Our own petite Saint-Tropez,” said Ambrose at his side. “I thought we'd be at the Col du Brochet by now.”

“Picking our way over this beast's ribcage slowed our progress.”

“Tomorrow morning we'll get an early start. I'm guessing we'll hit the Col du Brochet an hour into our hike. After that, we'll start our descent down to the Geltenhütte. Monsieur Acolas told me that we'd find a dangling metal ladder nailed into the mountain there that will shorten the hike to Gstaad by six hours.”

“The famous Ladder in the sky. You have to hold on, or there's a
real
shortcut to the bottom,” said Jim, laughing.

“Hey, where did the sun go?”

“Looks like rain,” said Jim. “We'll need cover.”

At the mouth of the cave, they dropped their knapsacks and unfurled their tarps and blankets.

“Five years ago, the last time I was up so high in the Alps,” said Ambrose, gazing at the view ahead of them, “there was snow on almost every mountaintop. Now you can see it only on a few distant peaks. It's as if these mountains are old men losing their white hair. One day only the crevices will retain the snow, and then not even those.”

“Wilderness evaporating before our eyes,” said Jim. Wilderness was the moon—or a woman's heart. Sally's.

“Hallo, bonjour!” Ambrose shouted into the cave. The darkness swallowed the sound.

“She's not up here, Ambrose,” Jim said. He settled his tarp under the cave's upper lid. Ambrose unpacked the wrinkled brown paper bag of nuts, dried fruit, and their dinner of sorrel and chicken.

“Do you think we're on a wild—”

The distant drone of the helicopter far below them interrupted him. The rumble faded into an echo as quickly as it had appeared.

“As if on cue, eh? I was asking myself the same question.” Ambrose spread his dinner on a napkin. “Finding a woman in the Wildhorn seemed a lot easier with all that wine and beauty in our midst. I agree with you. Calliope is probably camping down by the side of the Iffigsee, way below the Cabane, with a view of grazing brown cows. We might very well catch a glimpse of her on our descent.”

“I'll be taking the longer way down.”

“As I've told you—”

“I need this time on my own, Ambrose, especially before I go back to work.”

“Go soul-searching in the lowlands, my friend, not up here, where no mammals dare tread.”

“These are well-marked trails—”

“The lapiaz pass?”

Jim stowed his plate and fork and dinner leftovers and
lay down. Despite the tarp and blanket, the damp chill of the cave floor pressed into his skin. “We'll discuss this in the morning.”

Ambrose stared behind him into the black maw of the cave. “I'm half-afraid the hermitess will find us up here. She could be spying on us from inside this cave. Hear that?”

“Bats?” said Jim.

“I would have preferred the sandy Saint-Tropez,” said Ambrose.

“Wet, but bat-free.”

“And warmer than on the edge of this mountain's carapace. The temperature has dropped.”

“I hear her voice in the rain,” said Jim.